BigWorld: Gavin Longhurst and Simon Hayes Exclusive ION Interview

May 28th, 2008

Content Extracted from TenTon Hammer.com

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye, Managing Editor

Answers by BigWorld’s Gavin Longhurst (VP of Business Development) and Simon Hayes (Chief Technical Officer)

The technical side of massively multiplayer online games is ridiculously complex. For the average gamer, hearing about middleware solutions and the licensing of graphics engines really doesn’t get the adrenaline pumping. Yet it’s a crucial part of the MMOG industry and should not be ignored, especially by the gamers. With that in mind, Ten Ton Hammer’s Cody “Micajah” Bye asked a series of gamer-related questions to BigWorld’s Gavin Longhurst and Simon Hayes at the ION Games Conference. Their answers were articulate and really help simplify the reasons why gamers should be interested in the technical processes of these MMOGs.

Ten Ton Hammer: Why should gamers be interested that an upcoming game uses BigWorld tech rather than any other technologies that are out there?

Simon Hayes: The gamers should care because the developers have probably more time working on the gameplay and special effects; things that are going to affect their day-to-day experiences. They’re doing that instead of spending all their time working on how to send packets.

Gavin Longhurst: If you look at the recent events in MMO gaming, one of the main reasons a lot of these other games decide to launch is because they either run out of money or they run out of time. That’s issues with the production process, building technology, lack of polish, and a lot of those projects go two to three, or even four to five years.

You also have an issue from a production standpoint when you’re building a game, as it’s often takes much longer than even the high caliber Hollywood films. You get people passing in and out of the company, and then you run into brain trust issues where you wonder which people have what knowledge. You may have one or two producers that maintain that continuity throughout the length of the project, but there are multiple changes on how the market is viewed and its position in the marketplace.

If you view game development on a very crude level, it’s boiled down to amount of money units, amount of time units, and amount of people units. We’re able to impact all three of those areas. The developers can get started a lot quicker. A lot of the really boring work is already taken care of.

Simon: At the end of their training, the developers have at least an avatar that can engage in combat and chat. They don’t have to spend their time working on the boring stuff.

Gavin: Rather than spending all of their time and energy working on getting the basic simple functions created – like just getting their client to turn on – instead developers can work on things like game polish, narrative, storyline, innovative game mechanics, combat; things any gamer is going to appreciate. You’re not burning 10-20 people for a year and a half trying to simply put a dot on a screen.

Ten Ton Hammer: What areas does BigWorld touch on? Do you touch on every piece of core MMO technology? Or are there still areas of a game that developers need to build on their own?

Gavin: Originally, BigWorld was created to go after the MMO and the online space. In the beginning it was construct to simply serve as the server component, which is where we’ve had the most success so far. There was no server component middleware out there, and we were seeing a lot of second generation server components. When we established ourselves there, a lot of our discussions with licensees were “Well, you’ve got this great server side technology, but I’ve still gotta write this DirectX client.”

We started working on that and trying to create a system that could build seamlessly large worlds where you could go in and out of doorways, long vistas, lots of geometry, building the idea of streaming information to the player, and other things.

Simon: But it’s always been about the MMO experience. You’ll have ten times as many animations, so you can’t just load the animations; you have to have them streamed in as you go.

Gavin: In your average first person shooter, you may pick up twenty weapons and kill 80 different enemies. But that’s your entire database for the game. In MMOs, you’re dealing with tens of thousands of millions of transactions between people, items, monsters, and other things.

Simon: We’re not criticizing first person shooter engines, it’s just that we built our engine as an MMO engine.

Ten Ton Hammer: What's the next big venue for MMOG gaming? Is their any region that remains untouched?

Gavin: Japan has really been the sleeping giant in the MMOG universe for the last five years. They haven’t really done anything. PC games just aren’t as big; it’s Planet Sony in Japan. The console history and implementation in that nation has been quite prevalent. Although it seems like the Japanese gamers fall into the socializer – acquirer model of gaming, they also don’t seem to enjoy PvP as much as Korean or American gamers.

That said, there is a PvP-based MMO in development in Japan right now that’s based off of the Fist of the North Star manga series.

Simon: Which is cool, because it really takes a lot of cues from Mad Max, which is an Australian movie.

Ten Ton Hammer: Fist of the North Star was the first anime I ever watched….

Gavin: What’s cool about that is the developers came across the BigWorld engine and basically within a number of months made the switch from their own technology to the BigWorld engine and had the game up and running.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you have a lot of individuals interested in your tech these days?

Gavin: Everyone wants to get an MMOG up and running. No one wants to make a movie anymore, it’s all about MMOGs. Developers want to make everything from an interactive Facebook clone to World of Warcraft with big hats.

Nobody wants to make a film anymore, everyone wants to make a MMOG. I read somewhere the other day that the gaming industry has won. The average gamer is now in their 40s, and you’ve got to concentrate on people that are wanting to get into this MMOG space.

The thing is, even if you’re building a client on our basic toolset, you’re still having to deal with your thousands of customers and dozens of employees. Our smallest team is probably 10-12 people and our largest team is well over a hundred. Once you add on all the outsourcing shops and that sort of thing, the teams get even bigger still. It’s possible to do a smaller, more focused MMOG, but it’s still a massive undertaking.

From a technological standpoint, we’ve been working for eight years on our tech, but we’re still not done and we’ll never be finished. Like any of these technologies – Unreal, EVE, and others – there are constantly new ideas, techniques, and demands from the users. One of the biggest things that occurred over the past two years was the influx of Web 2.0 functionalities. Socially networking in all of those features has been an interesting adjustment to our MMOs.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you selective about who gets to use your tech?

Gavin: We didn’t used to be. We were incredibly “hungry”. But we are now a bit more discerning. We still talk with almost anyone regarding their story, mission and game, but – from a brand perspective – we want to do things right. We have at least five titles – maybe eight – going live this year, and it’s important for us to manage that brand going forward.

We are trying to tackle fundamentally weird problems. High traffic, physics issues, streamlining the production process, those are the problems we deal with. Four or five years ago, the idea of a game coming on a DVD was bizarre. But now games like Age of Conan are coming out at 13 gigabytes. You’re talking about an incredible cost when you add up time to produce, overhead to produce, and the budgets are going through the roof.

But that’s one segment, the segment that’s balls out and wants to drive a Viking ship across a fjord. And there’s a segment out there for everyone.

Ten Ton Hammer: Are you Mac compatible at the moment?

Gavin: Nope. Until very recently Mac only held something like 6% of the computing population. For certain demographics that makes a lot of sense, but there’s a couple of very interesting shops around the world that can help migrate a Windows client to a Mac friendly client. We can’t do it in-house because we’d have to hire a bunch of engineers who would focus on that particular problem, and for just 6% of the market, that doesn’t make sense.

Nobody’s come to us and asked us to do a Mac build yet, but I’m interested to see when a company will pitch a Mac idea to us.

Ten Ton Hammer: Finally, many of the upcoming games that are using your technology have announced that they’re supplementing other third party tools like the Unreal Engine. Is that a fairly common practice? Do you help integrate those technologies together?

Gavin: So far, it’s been fairly uncommon. We have a world wide business and do a whole bunch of business in southeast Asia and Europe. But in the U.S., there has been – uniquely – a number of teams that are basically looking for the best way to position themselves and nabbed the Unreal Engine as a rendering solution. Epic’s done some terrific work with their engine, but there’s only two groups out of about thirty BigWorld licensees that are using Epic’s Unreal Engine.

Really, it goes back to what we discussed earlier: complex animation systems, large vistas, streaming technology, seamless outdoor/indoor spaces, and those aren’t necessarily factors that are associated with other engine technologies. But in the process of bringing our client up to that super-high fidelity level, other companies like id and Epic are coming down to try to function in the MMO market.

The thing to remember about the hardcore graphic effects is that it may sell magazines and look fantastic – look at Crysis for example – but there may be some problems with falling in love with that visual fidelity in that it won’t run on as wide a range of machines. That’s a killer with regards to online worlds and MMOs. You want to get population through the game.

We’ve spent an inordinate amount of time polishing for the low end along with including stuff for the higher end as well. We want to get those users through the door to help our developers make more money.